Question of the Day

Have you been impacted by the government shutdown?

Let’s talk pipe dreams. Let’s say you’re a Flint, Mich.-born computer geek in your 30s — we’ll call you Kerry Conran — and you’ve been to film school but have chosen to scrounge jobs as a freelance techie.

You’re into superhero movies, film noir, anti-nuke allegories such as “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” old monster flicks and cheesy serials such as “Flash Gordon.” You have this crazy vision of a zeppelin filled with men in fedoras docking at the tippity-top of the Empire State Building — an image you’ve hatched from watching “King Kong.”

Eventually, a major Hollywood studio ends up forking over $70 million for you to expand your vision into an animated theatrical feature and gives you complete creative control of a late-summer blockbuster — let’s call it “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” — starring human hotties Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie.

Just for yuks, let’s raise Laurence Olivier from the dead and feed archival footage of him into a computer and render him as a “Wizard of Oz”-like mad scientist. Oh, and you can bring along your brother, Kevin, too. We’ll let him supervise the production design of this hypothetical late-summer blockbuster, which, by the way, has a dynamite superheroic score.

Kerry Conran, this is your life.

The only thing missing is the blockbuster box-office receipts — but in three days, we’ll know if that, too, becomes a reality.

Let’s face it, “Sky Captain” isn’t an easy sell. It’s got big stars, but this movie’s natural audience … OK, who is this movie’s natural audience? Men like their Indiana Joneses, but will they dig Mr. Law as a pretty Brit flyboy with perfect hair and a slight lisp? And will women dig these computer-generated retro-futuristic tableaux?

We’ve got young comic-book nerds, but our heroes — Mr. Law’s Joe Sullivan, head of an army of truth-and-justice mercenaries who flies a World War II-era P-40 Warhawk with a shark-mouth nose, and Miss Paltrow’s Polly Perkins, a golden-haired damsel and danger-seeking Gotham metro reporter — are brand-new creations. They’re not Spidey, X-Men or Daredevils or Punishers. They’re unknown commodities, and neither Mr. Law nor Miss Paltrow plays them with much zeal.

From the start of “Sky Captain,” as a brigade of mechanical monsters of unknown origins overruns Manhattan, the movie is hard to engage. The scale is vertiginous: It’s all giants and miniatures. The tones are dank gray-green, and it’s not until the action heads east — to Nepal and Shangri-La and undiscovered Pacific islands — that the fullness of Mr. Conran’s vision comes to light.

The story is this: A gaggle of oldster scientists who’d been connected to a top-secret project in World War I-era Berlin — those Germans again — have gone missing. A source of Polly’s tells us that one Dr. Totenkopf (the posthumous Mr. Olivier) is behind the disappearances.

Turns out the stakes are apocalyptic. Flyboy Joe’s gum-snapping right-hand man, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi) delivers the news — the whole Earth could be incinerated if Totenkopf succeeds with his long-running scheme. (Without going into detail, let’s just say the scheme is a hybrid of Noah, Thomas More and Stanley Kubrick.)

By now, Mr. Conran is treating us to a shoot-‘em-up that borrows equally from “Midway,” “Star Wars,” “Jurassic Park” and “The Matrix.” Miss Jolie joins the action as the androgynously named Franky Cook, a flinty flygirl with a black eye patch who captains one of what could be Mr. Conran’s finest creations — mammoth aircraft-carrier-like fortresses that float in the clouds on rotary engines.

I’m fully enjoying the ride at this point, but here’s what I couldn’t figure out: I couldn’t decide whether “Sky Captain” is a great movie or just an amalgam of 15 other great movies.

It could be that Kerry Conran is our next great moviemaker. Or it could be that he’s just a clever movie watcher with one big idea and an unreproducible run of good luck.

Anyone care to fork over another $70 million so we can find out?

***

TITLE: “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow”

RATING: PG (Stylized sci-fi violence, brief profanity, sensuality)

CREDITS: Written and directed by Kerry Conran. Produced by John Avnet, Sadie Frost, Jude Law and Marsha Oglesby. Cinematography by Eric Adkins. Production design by Kevin Conran. Score by Ed Shearmur.